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For Your Eyes Only: Street Fighter IV

New to the series is the ability to perform focus attacks. These attacks act as a way to crumple your opponent, setting them up for combos. They also serve to absorb a single incoming attack, so if you get hit one while performing your focus attack the attack will still come out, likely hitting your opponent. In order to use this attack, simply hold down the medium punch and medium kick buttons at the same time. How long you hold them down will determine the power of your attack. The downside to this is that it takes a while to fully charge your focus attacks, leaving you susceptible to your opponent's attacks.

Now comes the tricky stuff. If you see an attack coming, or can anticipate your opponent's block, you can use the focus attack dash cancel maneuver to prematurely cancel out of an attack animation. This is especially handy for moves with longer animations such as the dragon punch, cutting things short and allowing you to quickly stay on your feet and on the defensive. To do this, hold down the focus attack buttons, and then double tap left or right on your directional (or analog) pad to dash cancel out of the focus attack. It's a quick movement and tough to see unless you're paying attention, but you'll know when you've pulled it off when your character quickly flashes and returns to their fighting stance.

In this video, you'll see the pros and cons of focus attacks and the huge advantages possible when dash canceling.

Once you master this, a whole new world of gameplay becomes apparent, as the focus attack dash cancel maneuver can line you up for strings of combinations to demolish your foe. They're incredibly tricky to perform, but again, once you get it down, it'll leave others lying in your wake. To do these, you'll need to initiate an attack, dash cancel during a particular frame of the attack animation, and then unleash one of the moves that can be performed from this state. To perform these, the command will be any attack that can be focus attack canceled (the dragon punch, for example), then medium punch and medium kick to perform the focus, then the dash cancel. You then follow up with your combo. It requires precise timing and a lot of muscle memory, but once you've got it down, you'll be pulling them off like a pro.

You should experiment with mixing focus attacks into your combo repertoire. You can execute a combo and dash cancel into a focus attack, which will crumple an unsuspecting opponent, leaving them wide open to other attacks. On top of that, you'll be able to use the dash cancels to interrupt an animation to go into a defensive stance. If you know that someone is prepared to counter your attack, you can quickly protect yourself, keeping the damage you take to a minimum. It's a safe way to get in some chip damage while allowing you to drop back into a defensive stance.